2014-06-02, 18:33
I’m new to Android, Flirc and XBMC so it took a bit of tinkering and googling to get things all working but I have an acceptable setup now. I just wanted to pay it forward and try to explain what I did to get there.
At the moment the apps that I care about on the FTV are XBMC, Instant Video and Netflix. I wanted to control all of them using my Logitech Harmony. My Harmony setup is one of the Smart Home Control units that allows you to use an iOS app as a remote. After lots of fiddling around I think that these are the only steps that were necessary.
1) Program the Harmony to use the FLIRC. (In the software assign a device to be FLIRC and model XBMC)
2) Add a random device to harmony, but don’t bother to assign it to any activities. I choose a random TiVo unit that I don’t own. (I just didn't happen to have a lot of IR remotes on hand and the one that I did try didn’t work right. FTV kept getting duplicate key presses)
3) In this state you can get a lot of functionality. XBMC is fully functional, but the FTV has some issues. Back, Play, Pause and Home were the critical things that I didn’t have. To get those keys setup, you need to have the Harmony act as a keyboard. To do this I plugged the FLIRC into a laptop and programmed:
F12 : FTV Home
Enter: FTV Play/Pause
ESC: FTV back
Space: FTV Pause/Play (seems app dependent)
I programmed those four keyboard keys as the similarly named buttons on the TiVo device in Harmony, then I moved those buttons onto the XBMC / Harmony screen. I replaced the out of the box Play and Pause buttons with the two that send keyboard short cuts. (because the XBMC default config is not sending Space and Enter, it’s using something else. And the something else didn’t work with the FTV apps at all) For Back and Home I just added the two programmed TiVo remote buttons to the Flirc/XBMC config so that I could get to them easily.
Basically this left me with a Harmony device which is a merger of the Flirc/XBMC config with these four buttons added (and the original Play / Pause buttons removed).
First the disclaimer, it’s not 100% perfect. But it’s quite usable. I’m still not totally content with the way the back button works across the three main apps that I use. Same goes for play and pause. What I found is that the Amazon Instant Video player and the Netflix player don’t use the same keyboard key stroke for play/pause. One uses enter, the other space bar. XBMC on the other hand kind of uses both but they don’t do the exact same thing. In light of that I had to make a judgment call. What I decided to do is to program the play button to be enter, and the pause button to be space bar. The other pain point is with Back. The Back button that comes with the out of the box Flirc/XBMC setup doesn’t work at all in FTV’s menu but you can’t really replace it with ESC because the escape key in XBMC doesn’t move one level back, it takes you all the way out of the menu. So my current hibrid remote has two back buttons. One is XBMC back (which is just the backspace key) and the other is ESC (which is home in XBMC, but acts as Back in the FTV apps)
I hope that this helps someone.
Good luck.
At the moment the apps that I care about on the FTV are XBMC, Instant Video and Netflix. I wanted to control all of them using my Logitech Harmony. My Harmony setup is one of the Smart Home Control units that allows you to use an iOS app as a remote. After lots of fiddling around I think that these are the only steps that were necessary.
1) Program the Harmony to use the FLIRC. (In the software assign a device to be FLIRC and model XBMC)
2) Add a random device to harmony, but don’t bother to assign it to any activities. I choose a random TiVo unit that I don’t own. (I just didn't happen to have a lot of IR remotes on hand and the one that I did try didn’t work right. FTV kept getting duplicate key presses)
3) In this state you can get a lot of functionality. XBMC is fully functional, but the FTV has some issues. Back, Play, Pause and Home were the critical things that I didn’t have. To get those keys setup, you need to have the Harmony act as a keyboard. To do this I plugged the FLIRC into a laptop and programmed:
F12 : FTV Home
Enter: FTV Play/Pause
ESC: FTV back
Space: FTV Pause/Play (seems app dependent)
I programmed those four keyboard keys as the similarly named buttons on the TiVo device in Harmony, then I moved those buttons onto the XBMC / Harmony screen. I replaced the out of the box Play and Pause buttons with the two that send keyboard short cuts. (because the XBMC default config is not sending Space and Enter, it’s using something else. And the something else didn’t work with the FTV apps at all) For Back and Home I just added the two programmed TiVo remote buttons to the Flirc/XBMC config so that I could get to them easily.
Basically this left me with a Harmony device which is a merger of the Flirc/XBMC config with these four buttons added (and the original Play / Pause buttons removed).
First the disclaimer, it’s not 100% perfect. But it’s quite usable. I’m still not totally content with the way the back button works across the three main apps that I use. Same goes for play and pause. What I found is that the Amazon Instant Video player and the Netflix player don’t use the same keyboard key stroke for play/pause. One uses enter, the other space bar. XBMC on the other hand kind of uses both but they don’t do the exact same thing. In light of that I had to make a judgment call. What I decided to do is to program the play button to be enter, and the pause button to be space bar. The other pain point is with Back. The Back button that comes with the out of the box Flirc/XBMC setup doesn’t work at all in FTV’s menu but you can’t really replace it with ESC because the escape key in XBMC doesn’t move one level back, it takes you all the way out of the menu. So my current hibrid remote has two back buttons. One is XBMC back (which is just the backspace key) and the other is ESC (which is home in XBMC, but acts as Back in the FTV apps)
I hope that this helps someone.
Good luck.
